SCIENCE FICTION

By Gerald Jonas

Published: September 12, 2004

M. John Harrison is out there. In every sense. In the first few pages of his latest novel, LIGHT (Spectra/Bantam, paper, $16), set in England in 1999, we meet Michael Kearney, a physicist who kills women to placate his personal demons. But before we can get a grip on this mild-mannered serial killer, the focus shifts to the year 2400 and Seria Mau Genlicher, who has sacrificed most of her body to become the captain of a faster-than-light ''K-ship.'' When we first meet her, she's methodically destroying a convoy of unarmed spaceships along with their hapless crews. The only apparent link between these two cold-blooded killers is an offhand mention of the ''standard Tate-Kearney transformations'' -- a set of equations that, it's implied, have made interstellar flight possible.

The revelation that Kearney's genius will eventually open humanity's path to the stars should not affect our view of his bloody deeds. But of course it does, at least in Harrison's telling. As we shuttle back and forth between Kearney's world and the far future, Harrison invites us to feel Kearney's pain. While we wait for the mad scientist to make his post-Einsteinian breakthrough, we learn about his tortured childhood and about the nightmarish creature he calls the Shrander, whose unwanted attentions can be deflected only by another killing. We also learn about Seria Mau Genlicher's tortured childhood, and about her equally twisted compatriots, who are pursuing the holy grail of the far future: bits of alien technology abandoned in the oddest places by a now-vanished civilization of unimaginable intelligence.

If I've made this many-stranded narrative sound complicated, I assure you that I haven't begun to do it justice. Indeed, Harrison continually tries the reader's patience by dropping in references to important new developments that he doesn't get around to explaining until many pages later. Yet in the long run he does explain, or at least justify, most of his inventions, and readers who expend the effort to puzzle out the motivations and machinations of the main characters will be amply rewarded.

Harrison brings an up-to-date sensibility to the hoary conceits of science fiction. By what moral calculus is his mad scientist any madder than the legions of researchers who kiss their families goodbye each morning and spend their workdays developing weapons of mass destruction? And while I wish Harrison had given at least one of Kearney's victims a sympathetic voice, it's clear that his narrative strategy is one of shock and awe: shock at the recognition that we live in a universe indifferent to human concerns, awe at the inexhaustible abundance of that universe. What's extraordinary is that Harrison's tale, for all its unflinching candor, succeeds in evoking the sense of wonder that science fiction readers look for in the best of the genre.

THE COYOTE KINGS OF THE SPACE-AGE BACHELOR PAD, by Minister Faust (Del Rey/Ballantine, paper, $14.95), makes something new out of something old. What's old is the story itself: a race between good guys and bad guys to unearth the key to an ancient Egyptian superscience that's indistinguishable from magic. What's new is the setting -- the not exactly glamorous metropolis of Edmonton, Alberta -- and the good guys themselves: two young black men, brilliant underachievers who are drawn into a life-or-death adventure by a mystery woman whose motives they have reason to suspect but whose magnetism one of them, Hamza Senesert, cannot deny.

Hamza is a college dropout and would-be writer who washes dishes for a living while trying to get over a lost love. His roommate, Yehat Gerbles, is a video-store clerk with a gift for tinkering. While dreaming big dreams, they find solace in pop culture -- everything from the original Star Trek series and Marvel Comics to the movie music of John Williams and the latest Afro-pop.

Minister Faust brings their world alive in a jumpy, hold-nothing-back style that works more often than not: ''These gray-tone, deep-moan, raw-funk streets, leaf-shadow-dappled, taste-in-my-mouth-Snappled. It's a bebop/hip-hop/jump shot kinda morning.'' Those streets are the streets of a Canadian city that Faust anatomizes with the same loving care Joyce brought to early-20th-century Dublin. As for the bad guys, they may be irremediably evil, but Faust treats each one as an individual, so when the final confrontation takes place, the strengths and weaknesses of each combatant play a role in the denouement. Despite its hand-me-down plot, Faust's debut novel is a fresh and stylish entertainment.

Rudy Rucker's FREK AND THE ELIXIR (Tor/Tom Doherty, $27.95) suffers from an excess of invention. At the beginning of the fourth millennium, young Frek Huggins is being scolded by his mother for not keeping his room neat -- and one item of clutter under his bed turns out to be an alien artifact that the intrusive local government wants to get its hands on. Before you can say ''E.T.'' or ''A Wrinkle in Time,'' Frek and some very odd companions are off on an escapade that will span space, time and numerous other dimensions.

For most writers, the future Earth that Rucker envisions would have sufficed for an entire novel. A superconglomerate named NuBioCom has replaced all plant and animal life with genetically engineered ''kritters'' that not only offer many advantages over the old biome but have made most mechanical devices obsolete. ''Suckapillars'' clean floors better than vacuum cleaners; ''turmite'' colonies eat dead leaves and other organic trash and turn out ''cloth, paper, wallboard -- whatever you needed.'' The dead leaves come from the living ''house tree'' that shelters Frek and his mother and sister, growing new rooms on demand. All this might be considered paradise, except that some people miss the original plants and animals, and others, like Frek's absent father, reject rule by an unelected government, no matter how benign the living conditions may seem.

Just as we're getting the lay of the gene-altered land, Rucker snatches Frek from Earth and takes him on a magical mystery tour of the universe according to string theory, where oddities multiply until they lose their capacity to arouse our sense of wonder. Rucker, a mathematician and professor of computer science, offers a glossary that explains how some of his wilder flights of fancy are underpinned by the latest speculations of card-carrying cosmologists. But he runs afoul of the odd equation that insists, in matters of art as in life, more can sometimes be less.